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Monday, August 6, 2012

What legal issues do you spot?

This is not legal advice. Leave audio feedback at (512) 686-6329.

This is going to be an odd post...even by our standards. :) I am both announcing a project called "Sounds of the World Cup" and asking for people's opinions on the project. The project is to be a joint effort between Sportazine.com and Music Manumit. The project will be released under CC BY-SA. It is set to be a documentary primarily about fan culture through music.

Let me be clear that is not a fully baked idea, but I have been to the World Cup before, so I do know a little bit about what to expect. On the other hand, I have never been to Brazil, so that will require some additional research. Let's make up a random number...it's 75% percent baked.

The idea is to record game sound and music from each of the 32 represented countries at the 2014 World Cup, as well as festivities in the host cities. We won't know who all of those countries are until October of 2013 and we won't know which cities they will be in until December 2013. Thus, it will be hard to do a budget before then, but if we just assume the worst financially, then I think we will be fine.

The obvious first legal question is licensing of the music and game footage. As you'll see below, language barrier is a concern, but I hope to explain to artists and performers in Brazil of the educational documentary we are trying to make and hope that we get enough live recording to make the video. Otherwise, we can use Jamendo, Free Music Archive and other sources to find music from the 32 nations. Jamendo already has a nice search-by-country feature.

Now, licensing game footage could be harder. I've taken pictures of games in the past, and there has never been a legal issue, but some of the IP-related issues about sponsors in the London Olympics have made a least three people jumpy about this. I'm not particularly jumpy, but we've got some due-diligence to do before we actually file with Kickstarter. As I said on identi.ca already (link below at the end), this isn't planning on being an expose, so I doubt it will irritate anyone at FIFA. After all, we are planning to release under CC BY-SA, so FIFA would be free to use our footage in their commercials, if we got something good (assuming of course they credited us and made their commercial CC BY-SA...they could always license the BY and SA away for their own use too). I also can't imagine that FIFA would take any interest in us recording fan chants.

I am also hoping to get some commentary from various sports reporters from around the world. I have names in mind, but I don't think this is the place to post them until we have something locked up. There's also a possibility that we'll have some sort of partnership with the USSF. I have no problem saying that since, as an USican, if I were to say "we are working with a national federation," it wouldn't take a rocket scientist to figure out the most likely source. Let me be clear: there is currently NO relationship with the USSF (or FIFA, for that matter).

Brazil is a huge country, so the video team will probably need to split up into sub-teams. I'm hoping we can get press passes for everyone. I don't know how many teams we can have. Of course, each team plays at least three games, so there's the possibility we could just see each team play once. Having footage from each game that would could use would be great, but might not be the best use of resources. That will depend on interest, which countries are in which cities, and which languages we have covered. My brother is the only one that is for sure going with me. He is who went to the last World Cup with me.

I've got a friend from college that does professional video editing and I am planning on getting him on the team. As we "go to press," I have not heard from him. I have no idea if he adds anything language-wise. I am hoping to get a Spanish-speaker involved too. Again, no names until I have things looked up. We have a team member that speaks some French and some Vietnamese, but she can only go for a couple of weeks (also, Vietnamese is probably useless as Vietnam has already been eliminated from World Cup 2014 Qualification). My brother is the other most-likely team member and he speaks German. There is a large German immigrant population in the south, so that could be useful.

I have thought a bit about the budget, but it's going to be hard to plan too much in advance because prices are likely to be more expensive during the event. As I mentioned before, I think the key is to just guess high on everything.

One thing I have not thought at all about is potential donor gifts. That will be a project for another day. I may or may not test the waters with a post here. We try to keep the content strictly legal here and the way I'm convincing myself this particular post works is that I'm asking for audience participation in identifying legal issues.

While not something that will probably give rise to a legal issue, I also want to mention that I've never done a Kickstarter before, so I don't know how long we can make the project for. It seems like we could collect money up until that December because we wouldn't be able to make decisions until then anyway.

So, what legal issues have I missed or over-looked? Any suggestions on the logistical front? Thanks!

As referenced above, I also want to point people to the two discussions about this project that has started on identi.ca and status.net.